BLOW UP

Friedman Benda announces its fifth annual guest-curated exhibition entitled Blow Up. Curated by FELIXBURRICHTER, the founder and editor of the architecture and design magazine PIN–UP, the exhibition will take the miniaturized domestic ideal of the dollhouse and blow it back up to full size. With the help of design firm CHARLAPHYMAN & HERRERO, Burrichter will transform the gallery space into a Freudian trip through a 1:1 dollhouse, complete with bedroom, dining room, kitchen, study, and nursery.

Throughout the exhibition, the art and design will bear the strangeness of their “re-rescaling” as simplified forms designed for a miniature world entering back into our own. Shrunken furniture will be restored to macro scale in a double abstraction that leaves everything at uncanny and uneven. “Blow Up is a show about the aesthetics and materiality of scale, and how the objects we’re surrounded with during our childhood condition our ideas of domesticity, taste, and social norms today,” states Burrichter.

Blow Up is a dialogue between seminal designs from 1970s and 80s by Wendell Castle, Gaetano Pesce, and Shiro Kuramata, with contemporary art and design, including over a dozen works specially commissioned for the show."